Book Quotes

(All of the pictures and many of the quotes on this page were shamelessly ripped off from sites all over the internet)

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five-cent books are different.

-         John Steinbeck

There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

-         G.K. Chesterton

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

-         Charles Dickens

The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as the mother who talks about her own children.

-          Benjamin Disraeli

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.

-         Benjamin Disraeli

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.

-         Anatole France

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

-         Edward Gibbon

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

-         Remy de Gourmont

Everything comes to him who waits except a loaned book.

-         Kin Hubbard

A woman who writes commits two sins: she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.

                             -     Alphonse Karr

            (Mr. Karr’s opinions are not shared by this website)

I’ve given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.

-         Oscar Levant

For people who like that kind of book, that is the kind of book they will like.

-         Abraham Lincoln

It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.

-         Rose Macaulay

There are seventy million books in American libraries, but the one you want to read is always out.

-         Tom Masson

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

                             -      Mark Twain

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

-         Ecclesiastes 12:12

“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

-         Lewis Carroll

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

-         Oliver Wendell Holmes

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a book kills reason itself.

-         Milton  (1644)

I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

                             -     Montesquieu

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

                             -     Groucho Marx

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue-you sell him a whole new life.
                            - Christopher Morley

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

-        Stephan Mallarme

I cannot live without books.

-        Thomas Jefferson  

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.

- Jorge Luis Borges

When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge. 

              - The Book of the Book – Idries Shah         

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

- Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

  - Thomas Carlyle

To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.

- Robertson Davies, "The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks"

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.

- Peter Ustinov (1921 - 2004)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

- Arnold Lobel

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

- Ben Hecht (1893 - 1964)

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

- Bobby Knight (1940 - )

There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.

- Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), De Divinatione

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books.
 

- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

The covers of this book are too far apart.

- Ambrose Bierce

First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.

-Martin Myers